eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

June 2015

06/28/2015

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge,” Confucius tells us, “dig two graves.” The Argentinian film, Wild Tales is a brilliant though black-humored reflection on one of humanity’s most dangerous of emotional feedback loops. In six startling twenty-minute vignettes, we get to watch six different revenge dramas play out before our eyes. Somehow, every ending is a surprise and a thought provoking morality play. Part Ambrose Bierce (Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge); part Edgar Allen Poe (Cask of Amontillado); part Mark Twain (The Man Who Corrupted Hadlyburg or Tennessee Journalism), part Herman Melville (Moby Dick), Wild Tales provides the viewer with an exquisite (though at times crude) look into the inner workings of human vengeance reflexes. Think of the various times in your life when you have been tempted to take karma into your own hands and you will no doubt find one of the six story lines resonating with your experience.

Ever wanted to assemble all the various people who have betrayed you, dumped you, undermined you, or used you for one grand recompense? You will appreciate story one. Ever been given a chance to exact revenge but been too timid to put the dagger in? The difference between the waitress and the cook in story three will mortify and stun you. Ever been the recipient of a class-based insult or found yourself taking someone else’s driving decisions personally? You will find yourself shaking your head in astonishment at what happens to the two men in story three. Ever been on the receiving end of bureaucratic injustice and abuse? Story four’s dénouement is bound to put an evil smile on your face. Ever felt entitled to take revenge into your own hands, believing that intensity of emotion is synonymous with accuracy of perception? Story five is a cautionary tale about how wrong we can be about who deserves what. Heard the truism, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?” Story six pulls no punches.

I am going to save myself some writing and let Roger Ebert summarize the plot lines as he does a relatively decent job of sparing the reader plot spoiling conclusions to the stories.

The first, pre-credits story, “Pasternak,” gets things off to a high-flying start. An attractive young woman–a model, we soon learn–checks in for a flight and hears she won’t get frequent flier miles because someone else has paid her ticket. On board the plane, she begins chatting with another passenger and learns they both knew a guy named Pasternak, a boyfriend she dumped years ago. Then another passenger says he was the professor who failed the same guy. Could it be--? Sure enough, the plane is full of people who’ve shafted Mr. P. And who’s that locked in the cockpit?

In “The Rats,” revenge is a dish best served with ketchup. When a grumpy man enters an empty roadside restaurant one night, the young waitress recognizes him as a corrupt official who drove her father to suicide. Sure, she’d like to see the world rid of him, but she’s not inclined to do anything about it until the diner’s gruff, elderly woman cook urges that it would be as simple as loading the guy’s fries and eggs with rat poison. The waitress is morally torn, but there’s also a practical question: Once rat poison is past its expiration date, does it become more or less potent?

The element of class conflict grows more pronounced in “Road to Hell,” which plays like a more macabre version of Spielberg’s “Duel.” Riding down a remote highway in his snazzy new sports car, a sleek corporate type passes a slow pickup truck and shouts insults at its grizzled, back-country driver. Naturally, the city slicker has a flat just a few miles down the road, and the first vehicle to appear in his rear-view is the scorned pickup. What ensues is apocalyptic . . .

The film’s last three stories are more expansive, complex and sharply edged in social satire. In “Bombita,” a demolitions engineer stops to pick up his daughter’s birthday cake and comes out to find his car towed – though the space wasn’t marked a tow-away zone. In the coming weeks, as his marriage begins to collapse, the enraged citizen seeks justice for his parking woes, and finds himself surrounded by fellow Argentines furious at “fascist” bureaucratic stonewallers. Is it possible his skills with dynamite might turn the engineer into a combination of Frank Capra hero and Che Guevara? In this land, it seems, anything but bureaucratic responsiveness is possible.

. . . “The Deal” starts out with a rich couple learning their teenage son has run down a pregnant woman the night before. Frantic, the father and his lawyer come up with a scheme to pay his poor gardener a half mil to take the rap. But then the lawyer, who demands a half mil for his services, brings the prosecutor into it, which will cost another mil, plus payoffs for the police… No wonder poor dad tells them all to go to hell, then realizes that his only real out involves something he’s in fact very skilled at: negotiation.

It might seem at this point the film couldn’t top what’s come before, but not to fear: “Till Death Us Do Part” is a corker. While previous tales hinge on enmity or distress, this one starts out with celebration and love. At a fancy wedding reception, the guests are giddy, the bride and groom enveloped in bliss. Until, that is, she discovers he’s cheated on her with a woman in the room. At first, she flees to the roof, weeping and suicidal. Then the prospect of vengeance hardens her, and soon he’s the one who’s groveling and sobbing. The reversals of emotional fortune continue until it seems we’ve just seen a decade of marital turmoil play out in one convulsive evening.

Any of these tales separated from the whole could surely win prizes at short-film competitions. Together, their collective impact proves the synergistic effect of true artistic vision. . . .

“To take revenge halfheartedly is to court disaster,” Pierre Corneille has written, “Either condemn or crown your hatred.” The characters in these six stories all go to the far reaches of their spite. Some return from the precipice, some leap well beyond into the dark canyon beyond. All speak to the irrefutable logic and inherent insanity of the spirit of revenge. The film has just a few too many offending indiscretions to recommend to any of my friends unfortunately. Its humor is palpable, dark, and wicked. But for those who understand the danger of pursuing revenge in their real lives, it is the sort of film that captures and distills oceans of real life rage-angst into a few nectar drops of pure but far more harmless revenge fantasy. But for the grace of God, we could all probably find ourselves starring in these plot lines.

Question for Comment: How do you moderate your revenge instinct? Or do you have one? OR has it just not yet been tested?

06/22/2015

For some reason, I can never seem to get enough of the Transcendentalists. Something about them keeps bothering and intriguing me. “How,” I keep wondering, “did they manage to create a community around the life of the mind in a world with so many pressing material demands?” This book by Susan Cheever goes a long way towards answering that question. Many of the Transcendentalists were allowed to be uncompromising because of the largess of those who were willing to compromise to live in the world. Cheever goes so far as to call Emerson a “sugar daddy” to many of the others. As is widely known, Emerson was able to offer various financial inducements to his friends and intellectual disciples to come and live in Concord as a consequence of his deceased wife’s inherited wealth (at least in the beginning).

“Without this obscure lawsuit entitling Emerson to his dead wife’s family inheritance] in 1836, it is hard to know what would've happened in Concord, Massachusetts, if anything. It was Ellen Tucker's share of the Tucker’s fortune that bought the Emerson house on the Cambridge Turnpike and was sustaining the Alcotts as well as the Hawthornes and Henry David Thoreau.”

“In the spirit of generosity and companionship, Emerson had brought all his friends to Concord: the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, and Fuller. He was also often supporting Thoreau. Sometimes he just seemed to get sick of the whole thing, of paying for everyone, of being the oldest and most careful of them, of being the one who had to act like an adult.”

I suppose there is a certain comfort in knowing that the original transcendentalists had to be bankrolled for a time, at least until their creative work turned a profit, which, for most of them, was long after they died. Cheever suggests that the original band of Transcendentalists who met in Hedge’s club were “the original hippies – young, smart, and dedicated to the overthrow of the stuffy existing authorities.”

“After decades of Puritan striving and dour farmers rising at dawn to tend to the necessities of crops and barns,” she adds, “after new governments creating hierarchies of necessary rules and regulatory structures, the battle for survival had been won.” Transcendentalism, like the Gilded Age after the Civil War and like the Roaring 20’s after WWI and like the 1960’s after WWII was a period of release after a period of rationing and hardship. It was a period when the tyranny of existence no longer held sway over the impulse to live free of constraint. Reminds me somewhat of a loyal parent who no longer has to pay college tuition for his kids. Grin.

Emerson, as always, could speak for the movement when he complained of the condition that he found his culture in as a young man: “Man has encumbered himself with aged errors,” he said, “with usages and ceremonies, with law, property, church, customs, and books until he is almost smothered under his own institutions.” Emerson spoke out against those who conformed – he seems almost incorruptible to some, as James Russell Lowell once observed of him, “When one meets him [Emerson] the fall of Adam seems a false report.” But to what extent was this a consequence of Emerson’s endowment? To what extent was he not tempted simply because he had been given what others find tempting beforehand? Is the secret to successful Transcendentalism to marry into wealth? It bears thinking about.

“Influenced by Emmanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and their followers believed in the power of intuition. They thought every man and even some women harbored the divine spark – every man including the poor and the rich, the hermit and the railroad worker and the landowner. They called this divine spark 'reason.' Sometimes this was an inner light; sometimes it was the voice of God. For others it was more direct – Thoreau's friend Jones Very thought that he himself was the new Messiah.”

In some respects, I suppose, it is Eden all over again. It is a challenging of rules that suggests that perhaps the divine law was never divine in origin in the first place. Maybe the final authority resides within? “You will be as gods” is not entirely a different message from the one that Emerson and Thoreau and Alcott and Parker and Hawthorne and even John Brown were espousing. “Author your own moral code.” Nietzsche would not be terribly far behind. One sees this clearly in the life of the unconquerable Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter as she wears her scarlet “A” proudly, and challenges her lover-slash-minister, Arthur Dimmesdale to decide for himself if his adultery was a crime. Cheever writes:

“Hawthorne had taken the sins that the proper men and women of Salem and Concord abhorred – adultery, the birth of an illegitimate child, sexual secrecy – and made them sympathetic. He had made the redoubtable Hester Prynne a single mother for the ages, a woman both lovable and resilient. The goodwives of Salem would not quickly forgive him.”

Fortunately for Hawthorne, his literary success allowed him to offend his community’s values without paying too dearly (like a successful heavy metal rock band today I suppose).

Personally, I think this is precisely what makes this account of the Transcendentalists so interesting. It is not so much an explanation of an idea so much as a record of how that idea somewhat unhinged the people who accepted it. All of them had to struggle with affixing boundaries to their impulses once the traditional ones had been removed. Their lives, to put it mildly, like people living the life of the counter-culture in the 1960’s, got “a little messy.”

Cheever explains how the Thoreau brothers fell in love with the same woman and how Henry was unable to win her or her family’s affections due to his unconventionality and refusal to compromise with the material demands of a possible family. She explains how both Emerson and Hawthorne adored Margaret Fuller but elected to remain, for family’s sake, (perhaps just barely) in their marriages to “safer” and (one assumes) more conventionally reliable women. Emerson, though married again with children, called Margaret Fuller “the one figure in the world worth considering.” Cheevers writes of Emerson’s letters to Fuller after she left Concord for Europe,

“When Margaret was across the hall, Emerson knew that he had to keep his distance. One wrong move would've brought down everything he had built for himself. Now that she was across the continent and they were both far from Concord, he began trying to get close to her.”

Jones Very became unglued. Bronson Alcott would have starved to death without a wife and daughters and Emerson there to provide for him. Each of the male transcendentalists seems to have countered “danger women” with “domestic women” but seemingly longed to follow their wilder transcendentalist inclinations, almost daring to live them out consistently. Hawthorne for example, married Sophia Peabody, the younger more infirmed sister of a woman he found his more intellectual intellectual equal (Sophia was an artist to be sure but she had long been sickened by medical treatments). “He was in love with challenge but he did not want to live with it,” Cheever says. “He traded passion for stability, troublesome intellectual companionship for an artistic woman who would never get over being grateful.” Margaret Fuller was a woman intelligent and widely read enough to get bored of you. Sophia wasn’t. “Fuller died in 1850,” writes Cheever, “in the twelve years after that, during which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote four extraordinary novels, she was memorialized and rememorialized in his fiction.” We are left to wonder what Sophia Hawthorne thought of this.

Margaret Fuller was also conflicted. She loved her feminist freedom and guarded it jealously. But she also longed for something beyond her chosen intellectual community.

“Forming her feminist views, Fuller was outspokenly aware of the way marriage was a trap for the women she knew. At the same time, she was often sharply aware of what she was missing. 'With the intellect I always have and always shall overcome,’ she wrote later in 1844, 'but that is not half of the work. The life, the life oh my God! Will the life never be sweet?"

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, so I want no promises to keep,” you can almost hear her saying. She would be close to forty years old when she married a dispossessed Italian count in Italy and had her first child.

One surmises that Transcendentalism was a godsend to those who adopted it but only if they had someone in their lives who could neutralize its effects for them, perhaps someone who would tolerate their flirtation with libertinism out of loyal responsibility. Take Bronson Alcott for example.

“At Fruitland's [Alcott’s commune], Bronson Alcott's ideas grew to their looniest ripeness, although little else that was planted there ever have a chance. Alcott’s ideas prohibited any exploitation of animals – cows were not to be robbed of their milk, nor horses of their mature for fertilizer, or chickens of their eggs, nor sheep of their wool. Animals would not be exploited by being yoked and forced to drive a plow. There would be no theft of honey from the bees, nor stealing of their wax. Dressed in floppy brown linen and living by the light of candles, the family and their hangers-on were to eat unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast.”

Had it not been for his family and friends bailing him out of this disaster – and Louisa’s later literary and financial success, Alcott would have reaped the whirlwind for his inner-light inspired foolishness.

“Throughout their friendship, Bronson was able to claim that he didn't care about property, while Emerson paid for the property he and his family needed.”

And then there is Thoreau. Once rejected as an unfit husband, he seems to have declared war on financial fitness itself. Thoreau was a man who could be deeply loved by neighbors and children so long as he remained one. He loved to hike, to explore, to take boat rides, to lounge by the pond, to read, to converse with kids as kids. “Some of his [Thoreau’s] students thought he must have made the place [Concord],” Cheever says, “because he knew so much about it.” I certainly have no interest in diminishing all that Henry Thoreau contributed to the way that Americans see the world. But he did what he did instead of a life he once wanted, not within it. He gave up something that he wanted and then pretended that no one should ever want it as his revenge.

Cheever has this to say of Emerson and Thoreau’s conflicted relationship:

“Emerson was sick of Thoreau's self-righteous simplicity – a simplicity he had so often had to subsidize with his own hard earned money. Thoreau moved out, and Emerson, who was very glad to be home, had his gladness dimmed by his family's obvious longing for his friend. It was hard, after all his generosity, to find that his [Emerson’s] brand of maturity wasn't as lovable as his disciple’s brand of immaturity.”

“Thoreau was so pure that,” as Hawthorne wrote, “in his presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear.” It would be silly to assert that Thoreau was not capable of living simply. But it seems fair to say that it was due to Emerson’s support that he could afford to be so cocky about how simply.

It may be worth pointing out that this transcendentalist struggle with the “real world” is apparent even in the movement’s culminating financial achiever, Louisa May Alcott. Her novel, Little Women, was written because her publisher requested “a book for girls” – something that she did not necessarily want to write. She did it because the family needed money (Bronson would not have stooped to such a prostitution of a gift I suspect). And when she wrote it, she modified her experience of life to make it good. “The book’s energy comes from a fierce yearning,” Susan Cheever says of Little Women, “a longing to have had the fictional experience instead of the real one.” For in her real life experience, Louisa’s family always paid dearly for her father’s lofty irresponsibility.

I am struck by how half true the Transcendentalist assertions wind up being. Perhaps this is why they continue to have influence but not dominance. The ideas of the Transcendentalists did bring them freedom; but not always happiness. As Cheever concludes, the greatest works of the movement came out of the failure of the philosophy, not its success.

“What creates a masterpiece? In the case of The Scarlet Letter and Walden, both arguably the finest works of two men who we now regard as great writers, the impetus seems to have come from a sharp despair. Both men felt, as they began to write, that they had nothing more to lose. Hawthorne had lost his job, his mother, his hometown; Thoreau had lost his brother and the prospect of any place to live besides a homemade hut on borrowed land. There is a fearlessness about both these books, and honesty about the human heart, with its petty angers and dreadful fears, that neither writer found again.”

From Italy, Margaret Fuller could write Emerson that she was finally happy. It had taken a willingness on her part to marry and be a mother to achieve. In other words, it had taken compromise. And she understood that to be happy in her new role, she would need help, as perhaps, do we all. “Meanwhile love me all you can;” she said in that letter, “let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.”

Question for Comment: How do freedom and responsibility interact in providing you or depriving you of happiness? How do you most need help being in the world while not always of it?

06/21/2015

For as long as people have been going to war I suppose, there have been prisoners. And as long as there have been prisoners, their treatment has been a subject of debate. One of my sons’ ancestors was a prisoner at Andersonville prison in Georgia during the Civil War. He was 150 lbs. when he went in and about 70 lbs. when he got out. My State of Vermont’s very own Ethan Allen was taken captive in Quebec during the Revolutionary War and later wrote of his miserable captivity on British prison ships.

The film, Camp X-Ray, might be seen as critical commentary against the detaining of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay though this criticism can be seen as muted and offset by the fact that the film’s principle subjects are not ever - the base as a whole - or the suspects held there as a body. It is a story about one guard and one detainee. It does not seem to try and reach beyond that one story in any generalized way. At one point, even the detainee that the film portrays explicitly states that he and the soldier that guards him are “enemies” though soon after he asserts that there is at least one member of the army who has affirmed his innocence (different than claiming to be innocent). The film opens with a scene in which Ali (the detainee in question) is taken captive. We know only two things about him. He has a batch of cell phones (we suspect that he designs them to be used in IED attacks) and that he is a devout Muslim (he prays in a room by himself.) With this evidence, we must assume throughout the film that he was involved in some premeditated attempt at orchestrating an act of violence either against civilians or the military. But we are also faced with evidence of his humanity throughout as well. Is he in prison because he is a monster or is prison making a monster out of him? We are left to speculate.

We must make up our minds about his moral character from what we actually see in his words and behavior. Ironically, when we first meet him, he is requesting the last volume of the Harry Potter series from the prison library, anxious to find out if Severus Snape is good or evil. "Snape is a complicated man,” Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling once said in an interview, “he was a flawed human being, like all of us. Harry forgives him. . . Harry really sees the good in Snape ultimately . . . I wanted there to be redemption." The director of the final four Harry Potter movies similarly states that the popularity of Snape as a character hinges upon the fact that you never really know if he is on Dumbledore and Harry’s side or the evil Voldemort’s. “I think the coolest thing you can do with an audience,” he said of those film’s portrayal of Snape, “is deny them a little bit of information."

Ironically, in Camp X-Ray, we must come to know this particular detainee in a similar way. The power of Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of private Amy Cole is in how she must do what we all must do when we find ourselves in close personal relationships with people: figure out just who they are. In doing so, she has all the normal data to go on; the records of his previous interactions with guards, her first impressions (not good ones), her intuition, and her actual conversations in the course of a year of guarding him.

“I don’t know if Snape’s a good guy,” she concludes by the end of the film, “but I know you are.” Viewers will be allowed to make up their own minds. I suspect that there are many who will argue that Private Cole has been “taken in” and others who will argue that she has seen beyond the façade of “evidence.” What is clear is that we humans are complicated. The line between good and evil meanders down through most of us while it no doubt bisects different people in different ways. The way that we evaluate others is also complicated. We are left wondering by the time this film has run through its credits, if compassion is or is not a liability in prison guards. As a military MP, she must treat all detainees as though they are exactly what her government says they are. As a human being, she feels compelled to treat them as they appear to her own judgement to be. This cannot be an easy position to be in.

It seems like such a mistake on the part of the universe to leave the administration of justice to beings so far short of the necessary omniscience required to effectively carry it out.

Question for Comment: Try to imagine what you would do to keep from going crazy if you were locked in a small cell for almost a decade, totally beyond hope of escape of rescue.

06/14/2015

Were the Civil War to erupt today and were it to cost a similar percentage of the population in casualties, it would amount to six or seven million dead. In short, in four years, Americans executed an almost unthinkable number of people in a fratricidal war between the States. This book is a logical exposition of what those figures mean in the actual lives of American citizens, both military and civilian. Every page is invested with line after line of anecdotal and statistical perspective. Few words are wasted and every page is worth the effort.

Drew Gilpen Faust has broken down the subject into a powerfully simple structure. She looks at just how Civil War soldiers killed and were killed. She looks at how they were then buried and then how they were identified (if they could be). This is followed by a discussion of how families were informed (or not informed) of their loved one’s demise and then how this information impacted those families and their faith. She then concludes with a chapter about how the nation and the states of the South went about re-interring bodies scattered all over the landscape and how they managed to accounting for the whereabouts of every individual’s remains that could be discovered. There is much to be learned about pre-Civil War American society, the war itself, and the way that it changed America forever.

She spends a good deal of the first chapter talking about social conventions surrounding the idea of a good death (Ars Moriendi is a Latin phrase for “the art of dying.”) “Civil War soldiers were, in fact, better prepared to die than to kill,” she says

“for they lived in a culture that offered many lessons on how life should end. But these lessons had to be adapted to the dramatically changed circumstances of the Civil War. The concept of the good death was central to mid-19th century America, as it had long been at the core of Christian practice. Dying was an art, and the tradition of ars moriendi provided rules of conduct for the moribund and their attendants since at least the 15th century: how to give up one's soul ‘gladly and willfully;’ how to beat the Devil's temptations of unbelief, despair, impatience, and worldly attachment; how to pattern ones dying on that of Christ; how to pray.”

These very clear guidelines about dying had been turned into something akin to a liturgy that people in the process of passing on followed almost prescriptively. “Letters describing soldiers' last moments on earth are so similar, it is as if their authors had a checklist in mind,” Gilpen says,

“In fact, letter writers understood the elements of the good death so explicitly that they could anticipate the information that relatives would have sought had they been present at the hour of death: the deceased had been conscious of his fate, had demonstrated willingness to accept it, had shown signs of belief in God and in his own salvation, and had left messages and instructive exhortations for those who should have been at his side. Each of these details was a kind of shorthand, conveying to the reader at home a broader set of implications about the dying man's spiritual state and embodying the assumptions most American shared about life and death.”

Unfortunately for so many soldiers, their personal ends came without a great deal of warning and in such large numbers at a time that the liturgy was usually abbreviated or per-empted by the bullets or shells that killed them. It is hard to tell someone nearby that you were ready to go while charging up an open field at Gettysburg. “Readiness was so important in determining the goodness of a death,” the author tells us, “that soldiers often tried to convince themselves and others that even when it appeared to be sudden that they had in fact been well prepared.”

Many times, the book records the sheer inconceivability of the numbers of dead after some of these battles. “With its larger volunteer armies, it's a longer range weapons, and it's looser military formations,” we are told, “the Civil War placed more inexperienced soldiers, with more firepower and with more individual responsibility for the decision to kill, into more intimate, face-to-face battle settings then perhaps any other war in history.”

Often the dead would simply have to be buried in mass graves or shallow ditches. Often there would not be time to bury the dead at all and they would lie out in the open air decomposing or being consumed by the animals and elements. In the early days of the war, there was an attempt to ship remains home but usually it was only the officers who received this distinction. “Embalming was expensive,” Gilpen Faust explains,

“So were refrigerated cases; so too were trips to battlefields to recover kin. Richer Americans had resources to invest in managing and resisting death that their poor countrymen and women lacked. All but taken for granted through much of the war, this differential treatment began to be challenged as the federal government assumed new responsibility for the war dead.”

Clearly, if a family could see their lost loved one last time, properly prepared for burial, they had an emotional advantage over those mourners who had no idea just where the body of their missing son or brother or husband lay. “Membership has its privileges,” as they say. There was, it should be said, no official government mechanism for returning the bodies of the fallen as there is today (I believe they call these honorable transfer ceremonies). Faust speaks of the psychological difficulties that hundreds of thousands of family members had to face in coming to grips with their loss when that loss was so unfinalized. “To contemplate ones husband, father, or son in a state of seemingly sleep like repose was a means of resisting death's terror” she writes, “– and even, to a degree, it's reality; it offered a way of blurring the boundary between life and death.” For a large percentage of families, this unreality of a dead loved ones was the reality they had to face.

“In the absence of arrangements for interring and recording overwhelming numbers, hundreds of thousands of men – more than 40% of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates – perished without names, identified only, as Walt Whitman put it, by the significant word UNKNOWN.”

It was interesting to note that just as the bodies of officers received more attention than the bodies of the common soldiers, the bodies of white soldiers rated more highly than black soldiers. And in their respective regions, the bodies of the “enemy” - be they Yankee or Rebel - at first, received significantly differentiated treatment. In many ways, it was the war itself that began the process of equalization. “The cemetery at Gettysburg was arranged so that every grave was of equal importance;” we discover,

“William Saunder’s design, like Lincoln speech, affirmed that every dead soldier mattered equally regardless of rank or station. This was a dramatic departure from the privileging of station that prevailed in the treatment of the war dead ..."

Unfortunately, the Civil War sometimes obliterated not just names but entire bodies, often leaving nothing behind to identify or bury. And Gilpen Faust tries to convey the ways in which this obliteration made it so difficult to recover from loss. “The blow that killed a soldier on the field,” she says, “not only destroyed that man but also sent waves of misery and desolation into a world of relatives and friends, who themselves became war casualties.”

“Freud, for example, contrasted mourning, a grief that understands that the loved objects no longer exists, to melancholia, in which an individual 'cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost ' and thus remains mired in profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love. Freud writes of the work of mourning, defined by the effort to come to grips with the reality of loss and then to withdraw emotional investment from the departed. Mourning is a process with an end; melancholia a state, and, in Freud's terms, a pathology. The particular circumstances created by the Civil War often inhibited mourning, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for many bereaved Americans to move through the stages of grief. In an environment where information about death was often wrong or entirely unavailable, survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to see clearly what had been lost and were instead encouraged to deny it."

". . . After her brother James was killed at second Bull Run, Sarah Palmer, wrote in anguish to her sister Harriet, ‘I can't realize that I am never to see that poor boy again… It is too hard to realize.’

“I cannot make him dead,” the first line in a poem by John Pierpont entitled “My Child” states. How was one to know when they should begin mourning when there was no body – no grave – no record – no last words?

“By convention, a mother mourned for a child for year, a child for a parent the same, a sister six months for a brother. A widow mourned for 2 1/2 years, moving through prescribe stages and accoutrements of heavy, full, and half mourning, with gradually loosening requirements of dress and deportment. A widower, by contrast, was expected to mourn only for three months, simply by displaying black crêpe on his hat or armband. The work of mourning was largely allocated to women. . . ”

"Formal observance of morning created a sense of process encouraging the bereaved to believe they could move through their despair, which might involve through stages of grief represented by their changing clothes: from the flat black silk, veils, and crape of heavy mourning, to the white trim and colors acceptable in full mourning, to the grays and lavenders that half mourning introduced, until at last they returned fully to the world and their customary attire.”

Republic of Suffering then moves on to just how great a challenge to faith the mass carnage inflicted upon the country. “Humans had been moved into the realm of animals,” she says, “and God threatened a distressing indifference to the fall of every sparrow.” Some historians have argued she says, that, it was only the widespread existence of beliefs about the afterlife that made acceptance of the Civil War death tolls possible. These commentators note that religion was, in some sense, essential to the continuation of the slaughter. “Confidence in in mortality could encourage soldiers to risk annihilation.” But when that annihilation was contemplated by the survivors, it rattled their faith in a caring God superintending a benevolent universe. “Reflective Christians in this 19th-century age of progress faced troubling questions about the foundations of their faith,” Faust suggests,

“New historical and philological scholarship and new forms of textual criticism had raised doubts about the literal truth of the Bible. As Southerners amassed evidence of scriptural support for slavery, anti-slavery northerners sought and found different meanings. These divisions and interpretations marked more than just textual disagreement; they represented a new uncertainty about the undisputed and indisputable power of the Bible itself, an unsettling contingency that struck at the very basis of conviction.”

Ambrose Bierce, one of the war’s great faith casualties, defined religion in his devils dictionary as “a daughter of hope and fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable.” Perhaps it was this massive neglect on the part of God in the war’s scattered carcasses that so motivated those who soon began going about the business of finding, identifying, burying and memorializing the “honored dead.” The care that the living began to exhibit in caring for the bodies was, in some sense, a compensation for the prodigality with which those lives were spent. Perhaps, it was thought, if the government invested the money in honoring the dead, people could maintain a belief that God cared for them as well. “They had compiled the list and drawn their maps as acts of respect and reverence, Faust writes, “as a small personal statement of opposition to the war is erasure of human life.” But if the intent was to express just how much God cared for the dignity of all who had fallen, some lessons were not entirely learned by the war and would have to be taught again in fifty years. “The notions of the equality of citizenship that animated the reburial program clearly had their limits,” we read, “ despite the critical role African-Americans and played in the identification and internment of the war's dead. Black soldiers would not be buried with white.

Ironically, in all of the cemeteries created for Confederate soldiers, bodies were assembled and were grouped by state, “in lasting tribute to the principals for which the conflict had been fought.”

In her chapter on “Accounting” Gilpen Faust details just why it was so difficult to accurately assess just who had died where and had been buried where. Even Robert E. Lee apparently, had managed to undercount his casualties after Gettysburg so as not to divulge just how weakened that battle had left his forces. In other instances, commanding officers might inflate casualty lists to make it look like they had suffered more (and thus been endowed with greater valor). Despite years of effort, “nearly half the dead remained unknown.”

Her concluding chapters begin to explain how the national cemetery initiated a new phase of American life – a phase in which citizens mattered to the country as individuals and not simply to their States. “National cemeteries, pensions, and records that preserved names and identities involved a dramatically new understanding of the relationship of the citizen in the state,” she says,

“In acknowledging that decent burial and identifiable graves warranted such effort and expense, the United States affirmed its belief in values that extended beyond the merely material and instrumental. Soldiers were not, as Melville articulated and so many Americans feared, ‘operatives,’ simply cogs in the machinery of increasingly industrialized warfare. Citizens were selves – bodies and names that lived beyond their own deaths, individuals who were the literal lifeblood of the nation.”

“You're his witness now,” Charlie Fitts says to Lt Colonel Mile Strobel in the movie Taking Chance, (about the process of accompanying a fallen soldier from Iraq to his home) “Without a witness, they just disappear.”

Perhaps this is what was so terrifying about the tragedy of America’s Civil War. So many just simply disappeared. And it may well be that this, more than death, is our great fear as humans.

Question for Comment: Would you rather have an extra five years of life or five years less but be remembered? Why?

06/06/2015

“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Psalm 118:22

I do believe that this film has been a long time coming. It exposes what is wrong with a lot of American institutions and what may well be wrong with America itself. Four young Hispanic high school students enroll in a robotics competition with eight hundred bucks worth of spare parts against America’s elite college engineering programs spending 20 times that amount and best them and then wind up working as chefs, mechanics, or getting deported. Why? Because three out of four of them were undocumented aliens. America. What are you thinking. You have millions of students who can’t be bothered to read a single chapter of a book they are assigned for a class that they signed up for and you are exporting high school students who take down MIT in a robotics competition? Are you seriously kidding me?

You want to save education in America and maybe America itself? Here’s an idea. Make it illegal to live here and not be a contributor. Give people passports and citizenship papers when they demonstrate that they can actually do something to make life better here. And then deport the people who can’t be bothered to even think up an idea of how they might do that. (I am sounding a bit Ayn Randish even to myself here I am afraid). Honestly, I think we as a country are going to have to wake up and realize that we are dying from a serious entitlement problem and it may just happen sooner than later. I am not saying that the task of protecting rights and rules is not important. But the fundamental job of a healthy system is to make it possible for the members of that system to actualize their potentials, not simply protect some abstract right to do so.

Deporting intelligence, initiative, capacity for learning, willingness to serve, character, this is just dumb squared.

Wired Magazine’s Joshua Davis interviewed the real life teachers that inspired the film. You may pick up some of my own prejudices about education from a few excerpts.

Lajvardi: For every minute I teach right now I’m required to have a script of what I’m going to do. If I have some inspiration during class, and an evaluator catches it, I get marked down. Nowhere in that evaluation do they talk about whether the kids are interested or whether the teacher has a good rapport with the kids.

Cameron: We’re trying to satisfy the superintendent or the principal. Which means we can’t truly focus on the students. It’s completely backwards. The student’s satisfaction and engagement should be the foundation of the system.

Lajvardi: A classroom needs to be a reflection of what’s going on in society if it’s going to be relevant to the kids. If YouTube is big, use YouTube in your classroom. Snapchat, Vines, bitcoin, lets them use it all. Kids already live in that world so we need to pull our heads out of the sand and start teaching things that reflect reality.”

In the first years of the 19th century, Beethoven stated that he was bored of the music he had been producing and that he wanted to “take a new path.” He composed the Eroica (Heroic) symphony and dedicated it to Napoleon who he believed was also taking a “new path.” The piece originally celebrated the fact that Beethoven believed that under Napoleon, talent and merit would be placed above tyranny, aristocracy, and status-quo job security. When Napoleon had himself crowned emperor, Beethoven scratched out Napoleon’s name it is said.

Merit, I should say, should not always trump rights. But neither should rights always trump merit. At some point in time, we need to realize that there are students suffering in classes because those classes do not challenge them enough, and that this suffering is as real as the suffering of students who are suffering in classes because too much is demanded of them (or at least too much of what does not appear to them as meaningful enough to accomplish). The education system as a whole will need to wake up and smell the aroma of this coffee. Students do not have a right to impede the education of other students who want to exorcize the right to achieve some better version of themselves.

Question for Comment: Look around your life. Where do you see merit, intelligence, initiative, risk taking, hard work, and desire for service being sacrificed on the alter of “rights”?